Metropolitan Museum of Art Reopens August 29th

The Met Cloisters in Washington Heights/Inwood reopens in September, most likely with the same rules.

Hours are as follows:

• Thursday and Friday: Noon  – 7 p.m.
• Saturday–Monday: 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
• Closed Tuesday and Wednesday

The Met’s virtual events  will remain active after the reopening, and include storytelling, live performances, film screenings, art-making programs, and conversations with Met curators, conservators, and educators.

The reopening comes as other NYC institutions and parks reopen or announce reopening dates.

NYC Libraries reopen with “grab and go” service

All five NYC zoos reopen July 24 or 27

New York Botanical Garden reopens on July 28

New York Historical Society reopens with outdoor exhibit

High Line reopens with timed entry.

Met Repening Special Exhibits

Making The Met, 1870–2020 is a major exhibition featuring more than 250 works of art of nearly every type, from visitor favorites to fragile treasures that can only be placed on view from time to time.

Included are rarely seen archival photographs, innovative digital features, and stories of both behind-the-scenes work and the museum’s community outreach will enhance this unique experience. 

The exhibit is organized around transformational moments in the evolution of the Museum’s collection, buildings, and goals, including the visionary figures and cultural forces that propelled The Met into one of the top museums in the world since its founding.

The Roof Garden Commission: Héctor Zamora, ‘Lattice Detour is a special installation by the artist, who was born in Mexico City.  It is the eighth in a series of commissions for The Met’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden,  which boasts stunning views of Central Park and Manhattan.

Zamora is known for works that engage public spaces and the built environment. In his practice, Zamora reinvents and redefines conventional exhibition spaces, generating friction between the common roles of public and private, exterior and interior, organic and geometric, real and imaginary.

Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle will feature the little-seen series of paintingsby the  American modernist. The exhibition will reunite the multi-paneled work for the first time in more than half a century.

Lawrence’s “Struggle” was originally conceived as a series of sixty 12-by-16-inch tempera-on-board paintings, spanning subjects from the American Revolution to World War I. It was intended to depict, in the artist’s words, “the struggles of a people to create a nation and their attempt to build a democracy.”

Lawrence planned to publish his ambitious project in book form. In the end, he completed thirty panels representing historical moments from 1775 through 1817—from Patrick Henry to Westward Expansion.

The Met Breuer is not reopening

The Met Breuer will not re-open.  It is being taken over by the Frick Collection, while the Gilded Age mansion where the collection is housed is being renovated, and as additional exhibit and event space afterward.

The Met used building for modern art exhibits.  It will be an odd juxtaposition to see the luscious Old Masters of the Frick Collection in a “brutalist modern” home. 

The Met Breuer originally was the Whitney Museum of American Art, which moved downtown to to a new building in the Meatpacking District in 2015.

Read more in this article in Art News.

Met Museum Admission Policies

Though the full financial fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic remains to be seen, the Met announced in April that it was bracing for a $150 million loss in revenues, resulting in institution slashing staff and cutting the pay of top executives.